


but we were something, don't you think so

by lavitanuova



Series: (slaps tsc) this bad boy can fit so much angst in it [1]
Category: Ghosts of the Shadow Market Series - Sarah Rees Brennan & Cassandra Clare & Kelly Link, The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Lesbian Clary Fray, Lost Love, Multi, canon divergent from city of glass finale onwards, get in loser we're projecting, implied - Freeform, kind of clace but also Not Clace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:26:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28235391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lavitanuova/pseuds/lavitanuova
Summary: it is not enough to saylovein arabic. you must say,be the thing that buries me—hala alyan==a story about ifs and ifnots and alternate worlds.
Relationships: Clary Fray/Isabelle Lightwood, Clary Fray/Jace Wayland, implied
Series: (slaps tsc) this bad boy can fit so much angst in it [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2068389
Kudos: 6





	but we were something, don't you think so

_ When I die, I will come in fast and low. I will stick the landing. There will be no confusion. The dead will make room for me. _

_ —Richard Siken, Real Estate _

A young woman sits in her bedroom in the dark, mobile phone pressed to her ear. Her red hair has been bound up in a messy bun, and there are shadows under her eyes. The wall behind her bed is decorated with photos and scraps of paper: a 21st birthday card, a sketch of her mother on her wedding day, a poster of an obscure band, a sappy love letter—but not, of course, from him. Those are stashed in a box hidden away in a corner under a pile of detritus, undisturbed for months on end. She can’t bring herself to throw them away, though, so they sit, and they rot, and they wait for her to return to them.

The call ends, but the woman does not put down the phone yet. She continues to clutch it in her hand, listening to the dull silence on the other end, as if she does not believe that the call has ended. Finally, she lets the phone drop onto the bed. It bounces off, landing on the carpeted floor with a soft thud, and for a while she does not move to pick it up. Instead, she turns on the light, goes to her dresser, and begins to put on her gear.

From the corner, the boy in the letter watches her.

* * *

The girl did not attend the boy’s funeral. At the time, she was not quite sure why, but at twenty-one she could look back and pinpoint the reason as an all-encompassing sense of wrongness, as if all she was seeing and feeling was nothing but a dream. Years later she would remember nothing of the day but sitting on a patch of grass and watching his ashes spiral into a pastel-blue expanse where the last morning stars still lingered. Someone was playing music- Vivaldi's Spring, though she couldn't be sure- the slightest strains of it drifting up to where she was sitting. He likes Chopin better, she thought, and her hands dug further into the dirt.

There was something in her hoodie pocket, and she could feel the outline of it across her chest. A single sheet of thin note-paper, almost imperceptible under thick fabric. She did not take it out. There was no need to, for nothing could have scrubbed the words from her memory. 

_ I don't blame you if you hate me, _ the boy had written.  _ I wish you would. As long as I can still dream, I will dream of you.  _

Barely a few days ago she had splashed across the water of an enchanted lake chasing after an angel long gone. She  _ knew _ if she had caught up to it she would have done anything, begged or screamed or gave up the world, if it would grant him his life back. If she had only caught up to it. If, if, if. Would he hate her now? 

The column of smoke became lighter and lighter, until it was nothing but specks in the brightening sky. 

* * *

In the months after, the girl threw herself into training- she knew that it was what he would have done, and if nothing else, the ghost of his bad decisions still remained in her heart. They would not receive a new tutor for a while, and so the boy's sister was the one who taught her how to jump, how to throw a punch, how to survive in this new world. They spent their sessions in uneasy silence at first, but soon they found that they could not bear it. The silence was too much unlike him. Over time, the ice began to crack, and the two girls began to talk (about, of course, anything except the war). They would laugh and quip and chatter, and after training they would loiter about overpriced cafes or tiny thrift shops or hipster fashion boutiques. One could say that they had become the best of friends. 

But when they finally went their separate ways, the girl would go home and look in her bathroom mirror and see someone that she did not recognise—leaner, taller, ever so slightly sadder. With her artist’s mind, she pictured the boy standing there, smiling with his arm around her. But it had all the reality of a waterlogged sketch smudged at the edges. She could not bring back his sharp jokes or warm eyes or the touch of his hand upon her shoulder or the feel of his lips—

When she remembered him, she tried her very best to remember him as nothing more than a friend. The kisses did not mean a thing: she could not live with herself if they had meaning. In a different world, perhaps they might have been leading up to something greater, but for now all she had were signposts on a pathway which had vanished into mist. So the girl did not speak of these kisses even to herself. It was not difficult.

Two can keep a secret, after all, if one of them is dead. 

* * *

The first thing the girl did after entering the boy's room was sneeze. Dust floated in the rays of sunlight that slanted through the blinds, like particles of smoke rising from a flame. The room had not been touched since the war, and it was still neat as a pin, the way he had left it when he had left for Idris. There was nothing there to suggest it was his room and not anyone else’s- the boy’s siblings had come in to put away his things a week or two ago. She was not sure how they had been able to do it. They must have been far stronger than her. Who was she to grieve over this boy she had barely known?

Drifting about the room like a ghost, she came to rest on the edge of the bed, the place she had once sat and pulled a coffee cup out of her sketchbook paper. Once that memory came, more followed, like photographs shuffled out of order: the greenhouse, the manor, the motorcycle; the fire, the city, the house.  _ It’s just this one night,  _ the boy had said.  _ How much can this one night matter?  _ She wanted to reach out to him across time, tell him  _ It meant everything to me,  _ tell him- tell him what? There were a thousand things she wanted to say, but in the end none of them were important.

For the past few months, she had kept on trying to persuade herself that they could have been in love in another world, that they could have been together without that shadow of a lie hanging over them. If, if, if. Always thinking of possibilities, of alternate universes. But she knew now that that was not true. This was the only world that existed, and despite all that-

_ I loved you,  _ the girl told him.  _ I don’t regret loving you. _

In her memory, the boy’s fingers intertwined with hers, and then let go.

She gave herself the space to cry.

* * *

The woman makes her way into the greenhouse, seraph blade at the ready. A demon, she knows, though how dangerous it is she can’t be sure. But to appear as the boy- and  _ here _ , too- she can’t imagine why it would want to do that. To taunt her? She slips in between the overgrown ferns, steps over a fallen branch. The moon still shines through the glass roof, light coming down in squares onto the cobblestones, though the  _ medianox  _ have closed hours ago. Emerging into the centre, she spots a figure in the shadows and draws her blade silently. She’ll end it now, and she won’t have to look at it a second longer-

The figure turns, and it both is and isn’t the boy. He has the same sharp jaw, the same sun-bleached hair, the same golden eyes, but he’s no longer the same sixteen-year-old she saw bleed out on the shores of Lake Lyn. He’s her age now, perhaps older, what he could have looked like in a world where he lived- except not quite, for there’s a hunger and a cruelty behind his eyes she can’t explain with the mere passage of time. 

He moves forward, and he’s whispering something that she can’t make out until she realises it’s her own name, over and over again, _ claryclarymyclarymydarling. _

The boy never called her  _ mine.  _ He’d never had the chance to.

She realises that she is in over her head. It’s an unfamiliar feeling. Not something the most powerful warrior of her age's accustomed to, not since she was young.  _ You’re not Jace. _

_ We are the same, in a way. I used to be him a long time ago, in a world different from yours. Where everything went wrong.  _ When he says this she can't tell if it's true. There’s nothing of the boy in the way he looks at her. She remembers herself, seventeen, sitting in a dusty room and dreaming about the impossibility of other worlds. How wrong she was. This is the path not taken. This is the future that never came to be. She's only heard of it in the Codex—never thought she'd see evidence of one herself, never thought it would come in a form like this. 

The man who isn't Jace holds out his hand.  _ I come from a world where you are gone. You live in a world where I am gone. We have no one but each other, don’t we? Come with me. Let's go away. I've got a world all wrapped up in a ribbon, waiting for you.  _

She could do it. It was such a simple thing to do, simple as grasping a boy’s hand in a bed a thousand years ago. She could go with him, run away to a house on a hill and find out what it was really like to love each other without the lie hanging over their heads like a guillotine. 

But it’s nothing more than a mirage. The boy she knew wouldn't speak like this, after all. She’d be loving a warped version of him, clinging on to a shadow from her past the way the morning stars cling onto the sky. In this world she has Isabelle, she has friends and family she'd die for, she has a future before her bright and gleaming and full of mysteries yet to be solved. Her story won't be ending any time soon.

The truth is that they're not sixteen, not anymore. They've changed so much since those kisses in the greenhouse that they might as well be different people altogether. Though there's a part of her that continues to love him, she knows, now, that there are a thousand different worlds. Perhaps there's one out there in which they're happy. Perhaps she'll even get to visit it one day. 

She ignores the outstretched hand completely. Instead, she steps forward, standing on her tiptoes, and she brushes the man's long blonde hair away from his ear. This is the closest she'll ever be to him again. She shuts her eyes, clutches his shoulder.  _ I loved you _ , she says.  _ I don't regret loving you.  _

And then, after a pause— _ As long as I can still dream, I will dream of you.  _

Clary turns away, stepping back, and when she looks up the man is gone. 

**Author's Note:**

> This started as me getting spoiled that Jace died in COG by a friend before I started and then I got really angry that he didn't and now we're here. Also title from the 1 by taylor swift.


End file.
